Monday, August 30, 2010

How do I use the transliteration feature?

What is transliteration?

Blogger offers an automatic transliteration option for converting Roman characters to the Indic characters used in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. This lets you type these languages phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation -- the sound of the words is converted from one alphabet to the other, not the meaning. For example, typing 'hamesha' transliterates into Hindi as:

Enabling the Transliteration Feature

To enable this feature, go to the Settings | Basics page, select Enable for the transliteration option, and select your preferred language. This setting will affect all blogs on your account, similar to the Compose Mode setting.
Next, go to your post editor and you'll see a new button.

Typing with Transliteration

This button toggles the transliteration feature on and off. (You can also use Ctrl+G as a shortcut.) When it's on, it affects the title, labels, and body of your post. The letters of a word will appear as you type them until you reach the end of the word. As soon as you type a space or a punctuation mark, the letters will be converted to Indic characters, like this:
If you prefer to do the transliteration all at once, rather than as you go, you can type your text with the transliteration button turned off. Then select all your text and click the button. Everything selected will be transliterated at once, and you can go back and edit it as desired. (Note: This only works in the body of the post, not in the title or labels.)
The transliteration will attempt to match the sounds of the letters as accurately as possible between the two alphabets. If you find that it's incorrect, however, you can fix it.

Correcting and Editing Words

Blogger Browser Matrix

Blogger's awesome wysiwyg editing features are fully supported in the latest versions of the most popular web browsers: Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows, and Mozilla Firefox. Safari support is coming, eventually.
Blogger's Preview mode and HTML formatting buttons work in some older browsers, but not in others. This table shows what works where. Please upgrade your browser if you want to use Blogger's latest and greatest features!
Browser Compose? HTML buttons Preview? Layouts?
Chrome Yes All Yes Yes
Firefox/Win Yes All Yes Yes
Firefox/Mac Yes All Yes Yes
IE 7/Win Yes All Yes Yes
IE 6/Win Yes All Yes Yes
IE 5.5/Win Yes All Yes No
IE 5/Win No None No No
IE 5/Mac No None No No
Opera 9/Win Yes**** All Yes Yes
Opera 9/Mac Yes**** All Yes Yes
Safari 2.0.4/Mac No Some*** Yes No
Safari 2.0.4/Mac No Some*** Yes No
Safari 1.2.1/Mac No Some*** Yes No
Key:

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Third-party Apps

The following is a list of cool third-party apps that integrate with Blogger in some way. Since these are third-party applications, standard disclaimers apply: your mileage may vary, you could experience data loss, we're not responsible if things go haywire, etc. If you come across any not on the list, please let us know.

Windows

Mac OS X

Web Apps

Linux

Mobile/PDA

Misc

Related Links:
If you are a developer:

To use the Blogger API, third-party clients should point to the following location:
http://www.blogger.com/api
 
 
http://www.google.com/support/blogger